Update 11 November 2017: Voting is closed. The results are in! I like Shenzhen. Really, I do. It’s an exciting, vital, and fast-growing city. The food is phenomenal. But as much fun as Shenzhen is, it’s not exactly “next door” for most of the Windows Driver Development Community. If you’re in Western Europe, it’s more […]
Attestation Signing — It’s NOT a Mystery
All of a sudden, you can’t load your driver on 64-bit Windows. It works sometimes. But it won’t install or load when Secure Boot is enabled. You heard something about needing an EV Certificate… you got one… it doesn’t help. What do you do now? Over the past few weeks, we’ve been contacted by several […]
Is Running the HLK Tests REALLY a Best Practice?
I can hear you now, scoffing as you read the latest issue of The NT Insider: “You OSR people actually think running the HLK tests is a Best Practice? Seriously?” I know this is what you’re thinking, because we had this same “discussion” internally among members of the OSR engineering staff. It turns out that how […]
Visual Studio 2017 Released — Driver Devs: Stay Where You Are
Good News: Today Visual Studio (VS) 2017 was released to General Availability. You can download it here. Bad News: The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) doesn’t support this latest version of Visual Studio, so us driver devs are stuck on VS 2015 for our driver development. There’s really not that much to say about it, except […]
The NT Insider Breaks The Internet!!
Whenever we release a new issue of The NT Insider, it’s always a big day here at OSR. It’s the culmination of weeks of writing, editing, and proof-reading. We even plan for the release several days in advance, having folks test our links to make sure we get everything right. There are about 60K subscribers to The NT […]
WDK Problem Fixed, Plus Preview Access For All
[Last updated 24 October 2016, 11:00 Eastern time — Fix broken link] I wanted to update you on the status of a few issues in the world of the Windows Driver Kit, and also let you know about new options for early access to new versions of the WDK. Side-By-Side: Working Again You may recall that RS1, […]
C Is Not Reasonable
Those of you who’ve read my Pontifications over the years know that the things that annoy me are truly countless in number. But most of the things that annoy me do so because I simply cannot understand why they are the way they are. Take, for one example, how arithmetic is performed in C. Now, […]
Debugging Target RS1? Good Luck!
[Last updated 31 Aug 2016, 16:11 Eastern time] Update: As of 31 August 2016, we have verified that RS1 symbols are now present and indexed on the MSFT Symbol Server. Yay! We’re back in business! The hits to driver developers just keep on coming when it comes to RS1. The latest? The symbols for WDF01000.SYS and […]
Careful With Your VS 2015 Updates!
[Last updated 3 Aug 2016, 11:05 Eastern time to clarify some wording] Yesterday was 2 August 2016 — Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607, build 14393) was released. As welcome as the Windows updates themselves are, they also come with updates to VS, the SDK, and the WDK. In the past 24 hours we’ve discovered that […]
Fix WDK Doc Issues — Yourself. And Fast!
If you use the WDK doc set all day, every day, you almost certainly have a few pet peeves — things in the docs that drive you nuts and that you’d like to change. Now, you make those changes yourself! Well, almost. In its latest move to open source, Microsoft has started putting all the WDK documentation on GitHub. No, […]